Bullet in the Brain

...means "take up and read", which is precisely what I felt like doing after having seen this marvelous film.

Von Ancken stimulates and inspires with this breathtaking and superbly executed adaptation of Tobias Wolff's 1995 New Yorker article of the same name. The incredible performance by Tom Noonan is brilliant and provocative and the editing, sound design, cinematography and directing are truly inspired. The nuanced changes and embellishments on the original story are subtle, clever, and make the film cinematically more dynamic. It's lyrical pacing is mesmerizing and begs you to watch it again.

Watch out for this young director...he's going places.

This short film, Bullet in the Brain, is a great little piece of film that starts with a situation we've seen a thousand times before and ends as a quasi-meditation on life itself. Tom Noonan is great as always (hard to belive this is the same man who was so chilling as Francis Dolarhyde) and the rest of the cast is good also. Some of the shots are overwhelmingly beautiful- one in particular has the camera slowly traveling through the top fringes of a field. Overall, great stuff all around and I would hope a nice future in store for the director.

Anders is an over-critical writing teacher who carries is criticism into his own life. When he is involved in a bank robbery his critical remarks lead to his death. In the instant the bullet travels into his brain we are treated to writing par excellence as his life passes before his eyes.

Man some short films can suck. Some really just turn you off with their pretension and their desire to be arty. However some can feel generally fresh and just blow you away with the story, the telling, the acting and the sheer talent of the makers. Bullet in the brain is very much in the latter category.

The opening of the film sets up the character of Anders as an critical unpleasant man who is unwilling to make compromise or be polite to other people. This is enjoyable a sit is well acted and well directed. When the bank robbery happens it is well staged but is only the step to what I think is the best 5 minutes of short I've seen in ages. The murder of Anders sparks a narrator telling us about Anders's life flashing before his eyes.

It's hard to describe but this is excellent. The narration is written in a literary style that Anders would have approved of and is accompanied by perfect shots and images that leave the side issue of the robbery long behind. What Anders does and doesn't remember is wonderful and really tells you a lot about the nature and brevity of life. Plimpton's voice is absolutely perfect for the narration and he makes it work very well. However the direction is what makes his short so arresting. Every shot is captivating – whether it be a washed out silent classroom or a sun-soaked cornfield where you can feel the summer heat from the screen in front of you.

Noonan is excellent in the lead role and makes Anders feel real despite how unpleasant he is. The cast member I was most excited about seeing was Dean Winters – better known as O'Reilly from HBO's Oz. He is so very good in Oz that I was glad to see him in something else. He is good here but only briefly and his bank robber is too close to his O'Reilly for my liking. As I've said the short is sublime in the second half and praise should be given to the casting people for selecting Plimpton for the narration.

Overall it is hard to fault this short and I really want to track down the source material now to get more flesh on these bones. The first half will interest you as you get to know Anders, the second half will blow you away as you learn the power of words and the power of images when everything works just right.

Quite a good film, though the story it is based on is so transcendentally wonderful that there's something perverse about making a movie out of it. Astonishingly, whoever wrote the closed captions didn't look at the story on the page! The final scene in which the dying man's mind takes him to a boyhood episode in which another boy makes a grammatical mistake, saying that shortstop "is the best position they is", and as he fades out of existence he hears "they is, they is, they is". But the cc-writer puts "the years, the years, the years", which makes no sense in the context and destroys the delicacy of the ending.

This short deals with a severely critical writing teacher whose undiplomatic criticism extends into his everyday life. When he learns why that's not a good idea, we learn a bit about the beautiful craft of writing that he's been lecturing on.